Someone once said, "where they burn books, they will soon start burning people".
No one seems to understand censorship anymore.
You can still read the book. Just not in a school library. You can check it out of the local library. You can buy it in a bookstore. In some cases, you can read it online.
Banning from a library would be the next step up. And then banning it entirely. Then comes burning.
Yes, let's be vigilant and make sure we never get to the point of burning books. But let's not make those who oppose censorship look like rebels without a cause by crying wolf.
John Kerry's claiming the book is incorrect; he didn't use the word (that I see), but it's essentially saying it's a slander campaign. He's asking that they stop selling a book that's just out to slander him.
He's not legislating it away because it's damaging to him.
Granted, I'm a Kerry supporter, and you're clearly (by your signature) anti-Kerry. It's no secret that if you support someone, you'll make allowances for things, and if you oppose them, you'll blow things out of proportion. Which is why I hate arguing about politics.
Asking someone not to carry what you perceive as a slanderous book is totally different than him trying to legislate it away, which is what's suggested.
(First off, a disclaimer: I'm not defending censorship!)
People seem to have a hard time grasping the difference between an anti-something message and the something. Take the Qur'an, which states incredibly clearly that you should, under no circumstances, kill. And yet we have Jihad, based on a complete misinterpretation (IMHO) of the Qur'an.
A serious scholar might pick out the anti-racism message. A young child might not.
As you said, the banners (definitely not a real word in the way I'm using it) "didn't understand it." How would the kids?
I'm not agreeing with the ban. I just don't think it's as senseless of a ban as some people think.
This causes a problem with some Christian organizations, as it's clearly against their teaching.
And the opinion of "some Christian organizations" is impacting what's in a public school? (Maybe it's nothing new, but it still shouldn't be happening.)
How about the Qur'an? Do stories about an Islamic child get banned? It's clearly against their teachings, whether it's witchcraft, Buddhism, or Judaism.
Not that I'm a fan of Harry Potter (I saw that movie with family, and got up several times to just pace through the hallways, as it was more interesting). Not that I'm against Christianity (I'm a practicing Catholic). I just don't think the Christian church has any right to control what's in a public school.
I'm not so sure how I feel about this one. Something like "The New Joy of Gay Sex" I could understand. But I like the idea of people seeing a homosexual couple as normal. (Conservatives will totally flip out over that?)
Go back 150 years, and imagine it was "Heather Has a Black Mommy." I'm not trying to defend gay marriage here or anything, but I think it's the same thing -- I strongly doubt the objection to this book was because of the homosexuality, as opposed to the homosexuality.
A homosexual couple has nothing to do with sex until, well, they have sex. It'd be like banning a book with a mother and father because they have a heterosexual relationship. The mere act of having a child proves they had sex!
I haven't read the book, but if it doesn't cover their bedroom activities, I don't see the problem. But maybe that's why I'm a liberal democrat.
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
It's been years since I read this, but it apparently has a lot of deep-rooted racism.
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
I distinctively remember being in grade school and being shocked to find profanity here. I think it was just something like the word "ass," but that's horrible profanity if you're in third grade.
Some have said that Where's Waldo contains nudity somewhere. I've never heard of How to Eat Fried Worms.
Some people complain that the Linux CLI is too user-unfriendly. Have they tried using this thing?
Setting the time: Press Verb 2 5 Noun 3 6 Entr. Then enter a + to indicate you're entering the time in decimal, not octal. Be sure to enter all 5 digits of the hour. Then press Entr, and enter minutes, and then repeat for seconds. And make sure you remember that the seconds are in 100ths.
Heh, we're having trouble at work. I work in a bowling alley. It's less than a year old, and was constructed at a cost of like $5 million, much of it being spent on the bowling equipment.
The mechanics are having some trouble, and keep calling tech support. We get a much higher level of service than you might if you buy a CD-ROM drive; we've had their techs fly out several times as part of our service.
But we rarely get anyone good on the phone. Last time someone called, they got really ambiguous directions on what to do. Our mechanic asked him to clarify what he meant. He couldn't, because he was just reading out of a book, and really had no idea what he was talking about.
I think the whole tech support approach is flawed. The 'first level' techs should know the basic problems by heart, and not have to use a book. And if they need the book, I'd rather be passed up a level, rather than read to.
Maybe they wouldn't make money, but I'd rather pay a little more for a quality product, knowing that some of the money was going to ensure that tech support knew what they were talking about.
In school, we teach children -- unceasingly, it seems -- about slavery, our genocide of American Indians, the Holocaust, and so forth. The goal is to ensure it never happens again, by teaching everyone about how terrible it was.
In Europe, though, it's practically forbidden to acknowledge that Hitler ever existed.
Although maybe they're not totally misguided here. Every now and then, I catch myself thinking along the lines of some sort of completely unfounded racial stereotype, formed only through hearing the stereotypes, not any opinions I've formed on my own.
I found AIM to be the biggest waste of time I've ever seen. I can easily cast aside TV, Slashdot, and the like, and work on a paper or whatever needs to be done. But after a while, I'll get bored and want to talk to a friend. It's no problem. I'm just going to talk to a friend, and I'll tell him I'm working, so I can't talk much.
But then you'll sign on, and five people will IM you all at the same time, and they'll all turn into full-blown conversations. Next thing you know, it's way later than you ever intended to stay up, and you're not even working on whatever you should be anymore.
The worst is when you HAVE to sign onto AIM to ask someone a question about what you're working on, and you know you'll never be able to sign off, and yet you have to.
It's like crack, I swear. There should be a version of Lockout that just limits you to, say, five minutes of AIM every hour.
Common sense suggests that Ted Kennedy isn't going to hijack a plane. Common sense suggests that an elderly American man isn't going to be a terrorist.
The thing is... Common sense suggested, until a few years ago, that no one would want to deliberate crash a jet into a skyscraper.
Sure, common sense would say that an elderly man isn't going to be a terrorist. But do you really want to stick to conventional common sense, which, arguably, blinded us to forseeing scenarios like 9/11?
A friend and I resolved a while back that we should file a patent for A protocol for expansion of the human race, and essentially describe the process of sexual intercourse in extremely vague terms.
After taking over all the porn sites in the world, we could start suing parents across the nation.
In fact, you should really just give me $699 today if you plan on having sex any time soon. The license is good for a whole year! (But only for one partner.)
If it wasn't money, it'd be something else. Lots of problems are caused by money, I'll agree. But it's almost always good ol' greed just manifesting itself through the medium of money.
And yeah, the salespeople lie straight out about it. They claim it covers anything.
Do you know how many places will tell you that, when whatever you buy gets old, you should simply smash whatever you bought and return it to get a new model?
If they're not, in fact, protecting against intentional smashing by hammer in the warrantee, they should absolutely be prosecuted for fraud.
I know some people do, but I don't know a single person who actually pays by the amount of data transferred on their web-browsing computers. (Sure, my server is billed based on how much bandwidth it uses, but I'm not viewing ads on a headless webserver located in a remote data center.)
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I don't agree with you. It's like a magazine. I pay $1.99 for a magazine; I don't get frustrated and rip out all the ads, because it's my money, so I'd better be getting $1.99 worth of content, not ads. Really, the ads aren't costing me extra (and in the long run, their inclusion is saving me money).
IMHO, you have every right to choose which images you see and which you don't. But I also don't think it's really that big of a deal if I use a meg of bandwidth over the course of a month in loading ads.
I've always thought that you could complicate things a bit more by simply hashing something other than the 'pure' password.
Suppose my password is "password," which I'm sure the MD5 sum of is well-known. But now suppose that, when I set my password to "password," the system actually stores the hash of "hostname:password." Now, you have to know two pieces of information: my hostname *and* my password. If you make "hostname" any arbitrary string, perhaps random banging on the keyboard by the admin at system setup-time, it's suddenly much harder to compute MD5s, unless you're on the same system.
Maybe this changed a few decades ago, but don't at least some systems still truncate your password to 8 bytes? (I'd venture to guess that the limit's been raised to something longer, but still reasonable -- maybe 256 bytes?)
That could really cut into your odds: now there are 2^8,386,560 passwords, but chances are slim that they'll be short enough.
I realized what a horrible geek I was one day when I was in phpMyAdmin, browsing through the users table for something or other, which stores passwords in MD5 hashes. My eye jumped to something that looked strangely familiar, and I eventually realized it was the MD5 of one of my more common passwords.
I don't have a clue what it is, but I was able to recognize it as familiar. Of course, I promptly broke down and started crying because of how pathetic it is.
I wish I hadn't just posted something here, so that I could mod this up to a 5. I posted about the privacy concerns; your post points out something equally as important: it just doesn't make sense to do it this way.
I'm not sure that your proposed solution fits with your previously-mentioned privacy concerns. Sure, you'll only see a given part, but you're still recording the whole thing.
It'd be like having the FBI record your calls 24/7, but only listen to them if something came up, or having police be able to raid your house the moment they suspected you, but not look at what they gathered without a warrant. Even if they were completely honest in carrying it out, it's still too Big Brother-ish.
I think that, if the requirements say you can only record brief snippets, then you can only record brief snippets; not record everything and only listen to brief snippets. While it's the same from your perspective, it's not the same in terms of what's actually happening, and it sounds like it's completely bypassing your privacy concerns.
If you're already designing an external microchip, why not design a whole little recorder?
Slashdot Mirror
Someone once said, "where they burn books, they will soon start burning people".
No one seems to understand censorship anymore.
You can still read the book. Just not in a school library. You can check it out of the local library. You can buy it in a bookstore. In some cases, you can read it online.
Banning from a library would be the next step up. And then banning it entirely. Then comes burning.
Yes, let's be vigilant and make sure we never get to the point of burning books. But let's not make those who oppose censorship look like rebels without a cause by crying wolf.
This isn't quite what it appears.
John Kerry's claiming the book is incorrect; he didn't use the word (that I see), but it's essentially saying it's a slander campaign. He's asking that they stop selling a book that's just out to slander him.
He's not legislating it away because it's damaging to him.
Granted, I'm a Kerry supporter, and you're clearly (by your signature) anti-Kerry. It's no secret that if you support someone, you'll make allowances for things, and if you oppose them, you'll blow things out of proportion. Which is why I hate arguing about politics.
Asking someone not to carry what you perceive as a slanderous book is totally different than him trying to legislate it away, which is what's suggested.
(First off, a disclaimer: I'm not defending censorship!)
People seem to have a hard time grasping the difference between an anti-something message and the something. Take the Qur'an, which states incredibly clearly that you should, under no circumstances, kill. And yet we have Jihad, based on a complete misinterpretation (IMHO) of the Qur'an.
A serious scholar might pick out the anti-racism message. A young child might not.
As you said, the banners (definitely not a real word in the way I'm using it) "didn't understand it." How would the kids?
I'm not agreeing with the ban. I just don't think it's as senseless of a ban as some people think.
This causes a problem with some Christian organizations, as it's clearly against their teaching.
And the opinion of "some Christian organizations" is impacting what's in a public school? (Maybe it's nothing new, but it still shouldn't be happening.)
How about the Qur'an? Do stories about an Islamic child get banned? It's clearly against their teachings, whether it's witchcraft, Buddhism, or Judaism.
Not that I'm a fan of Harry Potter (I saw that movie with family, and got up several times to just pace through the hallways, as it was more interesting). Not that I'm against Christianity (I'm a practicing Catholic). I just don't think the Christian church has any right to control what's in a public school.
I guess "Preview" is there for a reason. The "homo" in homosexuality was supposed to be italics, but then I meant to close the tag.
Daddy's Roommate / Heather Has Two Mommies
I'm not so sure how I feel about this one. Something like "The New Joy of Gay Sex" I could understand. But I like the idea of people seeing a homosexual couple as normal. (Conservatives will totally flip out over that?)
Go back 150 years, and imagine it was "Heather Has a Black Mommy." I'm not trying to defend gay marriage here or anything, but I think it's the same thing -- I strongly doubt the objection to this book was because of the homosexuality, as opposed to the homosexuality.
A homosexual couple has nothing to do with sex until, well, they have sex. It'd be like banning a book with a mother and father because they have a heterosexual relationship. The mere act of having a child proves they had sex!
I haven't read the book, but if it doesn't cover their bedroom activities, I don't see the problem. But maybe that's why I'm a liberal democrat.
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
It's been years since I read this, but it apparently has a lot of deep-rooted racism.
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
I distinctively remember being in grade school and being shocked to find profanity here. I think it was just something like the word "ass," but that's horrible profanity if you're in third grade.
Some have said that Where's Waldo contains nudity somewhere. I've never heard of How to Eat Fried Worms.
Some people complain that the Linux CLI is too user-unfriendly. Have they tried using this thing?
Setting the time:
Press Verb 2 5 Noun 3 6 Entr. Then enter a + to indicate you're entering the time in decimal, not octal. Be sure to enter all 5 digits of the hour. Then press Entr, and enter minutes, and then repeat for seconds. And make sure you remember that the seconds are in 100ths.
V25N36E+00012E+00002E+04400E
Totally intuitive.
Heh, we're having trouble at work. I work in a bowling alley. It's less than a year old, and was constructed at a cost of like $5 million, much of it being spent on the bowling equipment.
The mechanics are having some trouble, and keep calling tech support. We get a much higher level of service than you might if you buy a CD-ROM drive; we've had their techs fly out several times as part of our service.
But we rarely get anyone good on the phone. Last time someone called, they got really ambiguous directions on what to do. Our mechanic asked him to clarify what he meant. He couldn't, because he was just reading out of a book, and really had no idea what he was talking about.
I think the whole tech support approach is flawed. The 'first level' techs should know the basic problems by heart, and not have to use a book. And if they need the book, I'd rather be passed up a level, rather than read to.
Maybe they wouldn't make money, but I'd rather pay a little more for a quality product, knowing that some of the money was going to ensure that tech support knew what they were talking about.
This is Slashdot. We don't RTFA here.
This is actually a really interesting question.
In school, we teach children -- unceasingly, it seems -- about slavery, our genocide of American Indians, the Holocaust, and so forth. The goal is to ensure it never happens again, by teaching everyone about how terrible it was.
In Europe, though, it's practically forbidden to acknowledge that Hitler ever existed.
Although maybe they're not totally misguided here. Every now and then, I catch myself thinking along the lines of some sort of completely unfounded racial stereotype, formed only through hearing the stereotypes, not any opinions I've formed on my own.
I know we Americans are criticized a lot for being ignorant of other cultures, but this one might just take the cake?
Yahoo intends to defend its First Amendment rights should a French court try to enforce French anti-hate laws.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure France isn't bound by the United States Constitution.
I found AIM to be the biggest waste of time I've ever seen. I can easily cast aside TV, Slashdot, and the like, and work on a paper or whatever needs to be done. But after a while, I'll get bored and want to talk to a friend. It's no problem. I'm just going to talk to a friend, and I'll tell him I'm working, so I can't talk much.
But then you'll sign on, and five people will IM you all at the same time, and they'll all turn into full-blown conversations. Next thing you know, it's way later than you ever intended to stay up, and you're not even working on whatever you should be anymore.
The worst is when you HAVE to sign onto AIM to ask someone a question about what you're working on, and you know you'll never be able to sign off, and yet you have to.
It's like crack, I swear. There should be a version of Lockout that just limits you to, say, five minutes of AIM every hour.
Common sense suggests that Ted Kennedy isn't going to hijack a plane. Common sense suggests that an elderly American man isn't going to be a terrorist.
The thing is... Common sense suggested, until a few years ago, that no one would want to deliberate crash a jet into a skyscraper.
Sure, common sense would say that an elderly man isn't going to be a terrorist. But do you really want to stick to conventional common sense, which, arguably, blinded us to forseeing scenarios like 9/11?
A friend and I resolved a while back that we should file a patent for A protocol for expansion of the human race, and essentially describe the process of sexual intercourse in extremely vague terms.
After taking over all the porn sites in the world, we could start suing parents across the nation.
In fact, you should really just give me $699 today if you plan on having sex any time soon. The license is good for a whole year! (But only for one partner.)
So is SCO going to sue Microsoft for infringing on their claim to sudo?
I really don't agree.
If it wasn't money, it'd be something else. Lots of problems are caused by money, I'll agree. But it's almost always good ol' greed just manifesting itself through the medium of money.
And yeah, the salespeople lie straight out about it. They claim it covers anything.
Do you know how many places will tell you that, when whatever you buy gets old, you should simply smash whatever you bought and return it to get a new model?
If they're not, in fact, protecting against intentional smashing by hammer in the warrantee, they should absolutely be prosecuted for fraud.
Sorry, you've had too much to drink. You can't fly aboard our plane. You'll have to drive there.
Uhh... Anyone else see a problem with this?
I know some people do, but I don't know a single person who actually pays by the amount of data transferred on their web-browsing computers. (Sure, my server is billed based on how much bandwidth it uses, but I'm not viewing ads on a headless webserver located in a remote data center.)
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I don't agree with you. It's like a magazine. I pay $1.99 for a magazine; I don't get frustrated and rip out all the ads, because it's my money, so I'd better be getting $1.99 worth of content, not ads. Really, the ads aren't costing me extra (and in the long run, their inclusion is saving me money).
IMHO, you have every right to choose which images you see and which you don't. But I also don't think it's really that big of a deal if I use a meg of bandwidth over the course of a month in loading ads.
Do many systems even use a 'salt'?
I've always thought that you could complicate things a bit more by simply hashing something other than the 'pure' password.
Suppose my password is "password," which I'm sure the MD5 sum of is well-known. But now suppose that, when I set my password to "password," the system actually stores the hash of "hostname:password." Now, you have to know two pieces of information: my hostname *and* my password. If you make "hostname" any arbitrary string, perhaps random banging on the keyboard by the admin at system setup-time, it's suddenly much harder to compute MD5s, unless you're on the same system.
Maybe this changed a few decades ago, but don't at least some systems still truncate your password to 8 bytes? (I'd venture to guess that the limit's been raised to something longer, but still reasonable -- maybe 256 bytes?)
That could really cut into your odds: now there are 2^8,386,560 passwords, but chances are slim that they'll be short enough.
I realized what a horrible geek I was one day when I was in phpMyAdmin, browsing through the users table for something or other, which stores passwords in MD5 hashes. My eye jumped to something that looked strangely familiar, and I eventually realized it was the MD5 of one of my more common passwords.
I don't have a clue what it is, but I was able to recognize it as familiar. Of course, I promptly broke down and started crying because of how pathetic it is.
I wish I hadn't just posted something here, so that I could mod this up to a 5. I posted about the privacy concerns; your post points out something equally as important: it just doesn't make sense to do it this way.
I'm not sure that your proposed solution fits with your previously-mentioned privacy concerns. Sure, you'll only see a given part, but you're still recording the whole thing.
It'd be like having the FBI record your calls 24/7, but only listen to them if something came up, or having police be able to raid your house the moment they suspected you, but not look at what they gathered without a warrant. Even if they were completely honest in carrying it out, it's still too Big Brother-ish.
I think that, if the requirements say you can only record brief snippets, then you can only record brief snippets; not record everything and only listen to brief snippets. While it's the same from your perspective, it's not the same in terms of what's actually happening, and it sounds like it's completely bypassing your privacy concerns.
If you're already designing an external microchip, why not design a whole little recorder?